Chapter XVIII: Part II: The Religion of the Babylonians (8)

Here the message of the seer passes into a prophecy, and his office is distinguished from that of the prophet only through the difference in the mode of revelation. The seer went back to the earliest ages of Semitic Babylonia. The “seer” of the palace of Sargon of Akkad is already mentioned on a contemporaneous tablet by the side of “the king” and “the queen.”(363) Like the other priests among whom he was reckoned, it was necessary that he should be without bodily blemish. The leper, the blind, and the maimed were excluded from the service of the gods.(364)

How far the Babylonian prophet resembled the Hebrew prophet it is at present impossible to say. But there were certainly two important points in which they differed. The Babylonian prophet was, on the one side, a member of the priestly body; the mere peasant could not become an “utterer” of the will of heaven without previous training and consecration. There was, consequently, no such distinction between the prophet and the priest as prevailed in Israel; Babylonia was a theocratic, not a democratic State. On the other side, the prophet was closely linked with the magician and necromancer. Magic had been taken under the protection of the State religion, not repudiated and persecuted as among the Israelites. Hence, while the prophet was a priest to whom the rites of purification were specially entrusted, he was at the same time classed with the _sailu_ who “inquired” of the dead, the _musêlu_ or necromancer, and the _makhkhu_ or “soothsayer.”

On the other hand, there were prophetesses as well as prophets in both Babylonia and Israel. The employment of women in the temple services peculiarly characterised Babylonia. As we have seen, it was a woman only who was privileged to enter the secret shrine of Bel-Merodach at Babylon; while unmarried women were consecrated, not only to Istar, but also to the sun-god, and, like the priests, formed a corporate community. We are told that in the lower world of Hades there were female as well as male soothsayers; it was the home of the black art, and so reflected the constitution of the professors of sorcery in the upper world.

Along with the seer and the soothsayer, the prophet was thus annexed by the temple. A definite duty was assigned to him there; he was “the pourer out” of libations. The libations were doubtless originally of “pure” water, to which was subsequently added wine, whether made from the palm or the vine. Along with the libations all the first-fruits of the cultivated land were offered to the gods. Milk and butter and oil, dates and vegetables, were given in abundance. So too were the spices and incense that were brought from the southern coast of Arabia, the corn that was grown in the fields, garlic and other herbs from the garden, and honey from the hive. But animal sacrifices were not forgotten. Oxen and calves, sheep and lambs, goats and kids, fish and certain kinds of birds, were slain upon the altar, and so presented to the gods. It is noticeable that it was only the cultivated plant and the domesticated beast that were thus offered to the deity. The dog and swine, or rather wild boar, are never mentioned in the sacrificial lists. What man gave to heaven was what he ate himself, and reared or grew with the sweat of his brow. The gazelle, indeed, is named, but it is a scape-goat which is driven into the desert like the Hebrew Azazel, carrying away with it the sins and sickness of those who let it loose.(365) The gods of Semitic Babylonia were essentially human, and what man lived upon they too required. They had, moreover, given their worshippers all they most needed and prized—fruitful fields, fat cattle, rain in its season, and the blessings of the sunshine. In return they demanded the first-fruits of what was in reality their own; they could, if they so chose, deprive man of the whole, but they were generously satisfied with a part. The Semitic Baal was indeed like a divine king; lord and master though he was of the cultivated soil and of all that it produced, he was content only with a share.

Was the firstborn of man included among the sacrifices that were deemed acceptable to heaven? Years ago I published an early text which seemed to show that such was the case. My interpretation of the text has been disputed, but it still appears to me to be the sole legitimate one. The text is bilingual in both Sumerian and Semitic, and therefore probably goes back to Sumerian times. Literally rendered, it is as follows: “Let the _algal_ proclaim: the offspring who raises his head among men, the offspring for his life he must give; the head of the offspring for the head of the man he must give, the neck of the offspring for the neck of the man he must give, the breast of the offspring for the breast of the man he must give.”(366) It is difficult to attach any other meaning to this than that which makes it refer to the sacrifice of children.

The question, however, is really settled by the evidence of archæology. On the famous stela of the Vultures, now in the Louvre, a sort of wicker-work cage is represented, filled with captives who are waiting to be put to death by the mace of the king.(367) On a certain class of seal-cylinders, moreover, a scene is engraved which Ménant seems to me to have rightly explained as depicting a human sacrifice. In later times, it is true, human sacrifice ceased to be practised; there are few, if any, references to it in the inscriptions, and the human victim is replaced by an ox or sheep. It was to the offended majesty of the Assyrian king rather than of the god Assur that the Assyrian conqueror impaled or burnt the beaten foe; and among the lists of offerings that were made to the deified rulers of Babylonia, we look in vain for any mention of man or child. As in Israel, so too in the kingdoms of the Euphrates and Tigris, human sacrifice seems to have disappeared at an early date.

So, moreover, does another custom which has been revealed to us by the archaic sculptures of Tello. That was the custom of approaching the deity stripped of clothing;(368) and Professor Jastrow aptly compares with it not only the scanty dress of the Mohammedan pilgrims on Mount Arafat, but also Saul’s conduct when the spirit of prophecy fell upon him. A similar custom prevailed in Keltic Ireland, and the Hindu still strips himself when he sits down to eat.

The growth of culture, and it may be also the mixture of races, thus deprived the gods of two of the prerogatives they had once enjoyed. They could no longer claim the firstborn of men, nor require that the worshipper should enter their presence naked and defenceless. But they retained all their other kingly rights. A tithe of all that the land produced was theirs, and it was rigorously exacted, for the support of the temples and priests. Babylonia, in short, was the inventor of tithe.

Why it should have been a tenth we cannot say. The numerical system of the Babylonians was sexagesimal and duodecimal, not decimal, and the year consisted of twelve months, not of ten. Perhaps the institution went back to a period when the year of twelve months had not yet been fixed, and, like the lunar year of the modern Mohammedan, it still possessed but ten months. However this may be, the tithe became a marked characteristic of Babylonian religious life. It was paid by all classes; even the king and his heir were not exempt from it. One of the last acts of the crown prince Belshazzar was to pay the tithe, forty-seven shekels in amount, due from his sister to the temple of the sun-god at Sippara, at the very moment when Cyrus was knocking at the gates of Babylon.(369) It is probable that the daily sacrifices were provided for in great measure out of the tithe; at all events, Assur-bani-pal tells us that after the suppression of the Babylonian revolt, he levied upon the people the provision needed for the sacrifices made to Assur and Beltis and the gods of Assyria. They were, however, often endowed specially; thus Nebuchadrezzar made special provision for the daily sacrifice of eight lambs in the temple of Nergal at Cuthah; and an earlier king of Babylonia describes how he had increased the endowment of the stated offerings at Sippara.

The daily sacrifice was called the _ṡatttûku_, a term which goes back to the age when the Semite was first mingling with the older Sumerian.(370) There were other terms in use to denote the various kinds of offering that were presented to the gods. The animal sacrifice had the name of _zîbu_, the meal-offering being known as manitu.(371) The free-will offering was _nidbu_; the “gift” or “benevolence” demanded by the god upon the produce of the field being _qurbannu_, the Hebrew _qorbân_. Other terms also were employed, the exact sense of which is still uncertain; among them is one which probably means “trespass-offering.”

It is impossible not to be struck by the many points of similarity between the Babylonian ritual and arrangement of the temples and that which existed among the Israelites. The temple of Solomon, in fact, was little more than a reproduction of a Babylonian sanctuary. And just as the palace of the Hebrew king adjoined the temple in which he claimed the right of offering sacrifice, so too at Babylon the palace of Nebuchadrezzar—who, it must be remembered, was a pontiff as well as a king—stood close to the temple of Merodach. Even the bronze serpent which Hezekiah destroyed finds its parallel in the bronze serpents erected in the gates of the Babylonian temples.(372) The internal decoration of the sanctuary, moreover, was similar in both countries. The walls were made gorgeous with enamelled bricks, or with plaques of gold and bronze and inlaid stones. Sometimes they were painted with vermilion, the monsters of the Epic of the Creation being pictured on the walls. But more often the painted or sculptured figures were, as at Jerusalem, those of cherubim and the sacred tree or other vegetable devices. At Erech, bull-headed colossi guarded the doors.

But the resemblance between the Babylonian and Hebrew rituals extends beyond the ceremonial of the temple of Solomon into the Levitical Law. In fact, the very term for law, the _torâh_, as the Israelites called it, was borrowed from the Babylonian _tertu_, as was first pointed out by Professor Haupt. It is even a question whether the word is not a derivative from the verb _ahâru_, “to send” or “direct,” from which the name of Aaron was also formed. However this may be, even the technical words of the Mosaic Law recur in the ritual texts of early Babylonia. The biblical _kipper_, “atonement,” is the Assyrian _kuppuru_; and the _qorbân_, as we have seen, is the Assyrian _qurbannu_. A distinction was made between the offerings of the rich and of the poor (_muskînu_),(373) and the sacrificial animal was required to be “without blemish” (_salmu_). The “right” thigh or shoulder of the victim was given to the priest, along with the loins and hide, the rump and tendons, and part of the stomach.(374) Still more interesting is it to find in the ritual of the prophets instructions for the sacrifice of a lamb at the gate of the house, the blood of which is to be smeared on the lintels and doorposts, as well as on the colossal images that guarded the entrance.(375) To this day in Egypt the same rite is practised, and when my dahabiah was launched I had to conform to it. On this occasion the blood of the lamb was allowed to fall over the sides of the lower deck.

There are other parallels between Babylonia and Mosaic Israel which have been brought forward by Professor Zimmern. In the “Tabernacle of the Congregation,” or “Tent of meeting,” he sees the place where “the proper time” (_moêd_, Assyr. _adannu_) for an undertaking was determined by the _barû_ or seer; at any rate, “to determine the proper time” (_sakânu sa adanni_) was one of the functions of the Babylonian seer.(376) By the side of the rituals for the seers and prophets, moreover, there was another for the _zammâri_ or “singers.” The hierarchy of a Babylonian temple was, in short, the same as that of Israel.

But in addition to the architecture of the temple and the regulations of the ritual, there were yet other resemblances between the religious law of Babylonia and that of the Israelites. They may be traced in the numerous festivals of the calendar, and the time of year at which they were held. Foremost among them was the festival of the New Year. Babylonia was primarily an agricultural community, and the festivals of its gods, like the names of the months, were determined by the necessities of agriculture. Spring and autumn were marked by the sowing of the seed and the garnering of the harvest. But neither the one nor the other took place in all parts of the country at the same time of the year. In the south the harvest might be gathered in when the corn was sown in the north, or the seed sown when in colder regions the harvest was gathered in.

Hence it was that the same festival might commemorate either the beginning or the end of the agricultural year. But in either case it was a period of rejoicing and rest from labour, of thanking the gods for their benefits, and offering them the first-fruits of the field. In the old days of Gudea of Lagas the year commenced with the festival of the goddess Bau in the middle of October; in the later Babylon of Khammurabi the feast was transferred to the spring, and the first month of the year began in March. But the older calendar of Babylonia had been already carried to the West, and there preserved in a country to whose climatic and agricultural conditions it was really inapplicable. The ancient Canaanitish year began in the autumn in what the later calendar reckoned the seventh month. It was not, however, till after the final unification of the country under Khammurabi that a fixed and uniform calendar was imposed upon all the sanctuaries of Babylonia. At an earlier epoch the great sanctuaries had each its own calendar; the months were variously named, and the deities to whom the festivals were dedicated were not always the same.(377) At Lagas it was Bau to whom the festival of the New Year was sacred; at Babylon it was Merodach.

Besides the festivals of the spring and autumn, there was yet a third festival belonging to the agricultural year. This was the feast of the summer solstice, which fell in the month of June. It marked the drying up of the soil and the disappearance of the crops and vegetation of the spring. In some of the early States of Babylonia it was consecrated to a god Bil-’si;(378) in the calendar of Assyria, Tammuz took the place of the older god. Tammuz had perished by an untimely death, and it was fitting that the death of the god should be celebrated when nature also seemed to die. There was a time, however, when the festival of Tammuz had been observed, at all events in some parts of Babylonia, in October rather than in June. The same month that had witnessed the feast of the New Year witnessed also that of Tammuz risen again from the dead.

The three great feasts of the Babylonian agriculturist are found again in Canaan. But it is noticeable that the third of them—the feast of Weeks, as it was called by the Hebrews—was there the correspondent of the spring festival in Babylonia. It was, in fact, a repetition of the festival of spring. And the latter accordingly becomes a prelude and anticipation of it. On the 16th of Nisan the Levitical Law ordered a sheaf of the first-fruits of the harvest to be presented (Lev. xxiii. 10-14), and the unleavened bread eaten at the festival itself symbolised the ingathering of the corn which was thus dedicated to God in the form of consecrated cakes.

The three great agricultural festivals were supplemented by others. Many of these occurred at fixed times of the year, and commemorated the divinities worshipped in one or other of the sanctuaries of Babylonia. Some of them were observed throughout the country; others only in a particular city and district. With the deification of a new king came a new festival in his honour; and if his cult lasted, the festival continued also by the side of the established festivals of the older gods. But new festivals might further be instituted for other reasons. The building or restoration of a sanctuary, or even the dedication of a statue, was a quite sufficient pretext. When Gudea consecrated the temple of Inguriṡa at Lagas, he tells us how he had “remitted penalties and given presents. During seven days no service was exacted. The female slave was made the equal of her mistress; the male slave was made the equal of his master; the chief and his subject have been made equal in my city. All that is evil I removed from this temple.”(379)

The temporary freedom thus granted to the slave seems to have been a characteristic of the Babylonian festival. Berossos stated that in the month of Lôos or July, the feast of Sakæa was celebrated at Babylon for five days, when it was “the custom that the masters should obey their domestics, one of whom is led round the house clothed in a royal garment.”(380) The custom has often been compared with that which prevailed at the Roman Saturnalia, and a baseless theory has recently been put forward connecting with it the Hebrew feast of Purim.(381) But the custom was really the exaggeration in the Greek age of Babylonian history of the old doctrine which underlay the Babylonian conception of a holy day. A holy day was essentially a holiday, a day when the whole people rested from work, and when, accordingly, even the slave recovered for awhile his freedom. The summer feast of Sakæa, at least in its original form, or the festival ordained by Gudea at the consecration of the temple of Ê-Ninnu, was thus a parallel to the Hebrew year of Jubilee. In the year of Jubilee we have the western reflection of beliefs and usages that were familiar to the ancestors of Abraham.

The Sabbath-rest was essentially of Babylonian origin. The word Sabbath itself was borrowed from Babylonia, where it had the form Sabattu, and was derived by the native lexicographers from the Sumerian _sa_, “heart,” and “_bat_, to cease,” and so explained as “a day of rest for the heart.”(382) The derivation is, of course, absurd, but it indicates the antiquity of the term. There was yet another name, _sulum_, or “quiet day,” which was more especially used as a translation of the Sumerian _udu_ _khul-gal_, “dies nefastus,” on which it was unlawful or unlucky to perform certain kinds of work.(383) Thus, in a list of what we should call the Saints’ days in the month of the Second Elul, we read that the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th days of the month were all alike days of quiet and rest. “The 7th day,” we are told, “is a day dedicated to Merodach and Zarpanit. It is a lucky day and a quiet day. The shepherd of mighty nations (_i.e._ the king) must not eat flesh cooked at the fire or in the smoke. His clothes he must not change. White garments he must not put on. He must not offer sacrifice. The king must not drive a chariot. He must not issue royal decrees. In a secret place the seer must not prophesy. Medicine for the sickness of his body he must not apply. For making a spell it is not fitting.”(384) Here the Sabbath recurs, as among the Hebrews, every seven days; and Professor Jensen has pointed out that the 19th of the month, on which there was also a Sabbath, was forty-nine days or seven weeks from the beginning of the previous month. There was therefore not only a week of seven days, but a week of seven-day weeks as well. In fact, the chief difference between the Babylonian and the Hebrew institution lay in the subordination of the Sabbath to the festival of the “new moon” among the Babylonians. There was no Sabbath on the first day of the month; its place was taken by freewill offerings to the moon.

The Sabbath, it will be noticed, was not a fast-day. Fasts, however, were not infrequent in Babylonia and Assyria, and in times of danger and distress might be specially ordained. When Esar-haddon was hard pressed by his northern enemies, he ordered prayers to be made and ceremonies to be performed to the sun-god, lasting for one hundred days and nights. It was a long period of public humiliation, and the god was asked to grant favourable visions to the “seers” who implored his help. In the penitential psalms, fasting is alluded to more than once. “Instead of food,” says the penitent, “I eat bitter tears; instead of palm-wine, I drink the waters of misery.” Or, again: “Food I have not eaten, weeping is my nourishment; water I have not drunk, tears are my drink.”(385)

The fast and the feast alternated as they did in Israel. As we come to know more of the ritual of Babylonia, the resemblance it bears to that of the Hebrews becomes at once more striking and extensive. They both start from the same principles, and agree in many of their details. Between them, indeed, lies that deep gulf of difference which separates the religions of Israel and Babylonia as a whole; the one is monotheistic, the other polytheistic. But, apart from this profound distinction, the cult and ritual have more than a family relationship. Customs and rites which have lost their primitive meaning in the Levitical Law, find their explanation in Babylonia; even the ecclesiastical calendar of the Pentateuch looks back to the Babylonia of the age of Khammurabi. It cannot be an accident that the Khammurabi or Ammurapi of the cuneiform inscriptions is the Amraphel of Genesis, the contemporary of Abram the Hebrew, who was born in “Ur of the Chaldees.” The Mosaic Law must have drawn its first inspiration from the Abrahamic age, modified and developed though it may have been in the later centuries of Israelitish history.

Lecture X. Astro-Theology And The Moral Element In Babylonian Religion.

A hundred years ago, writers on the history or philosophy of religion had much to say about what they called Sabaism. The earliest form of idolatry was supposed to have been a worship of the heavenly bodies. A passage in the Book of Job was invoked in support of the fact, and beautifully executed drawings of Babylonian seal-cylinders were made for the sake of the pictures of the sun and moon and stars that were upon them. Sir William Drummond resolved the sons of Jacob into the signs of the Zodiac;(386) Dupuis derived Christianity itself from a sort of allegorical astronomy.

“Sabaism” has long since fallen into disrepute. Anthropology has long since taught us that primitive religion is not confined to a worship of the stars. The cult of the heavenly bodies was not the source of polytheism; indeed, there are systems of polytheism in which it has never existed at all. Of late the tendency has been to discount it altogether as a factor in the history of religion.

But the tendency has gone too far. There was one religion, at all events, in which it played an important part. This was the religion of ancient Babylonia and of those other countries which were influenced by Babylonian culture. But even here the decipherment of the inscriptions seemed to show that it belonged to a late age, and was an artificial product which never affected the people as a whole. When I delivered my Hibbert Lectures, I believed that I could dismiss it in a few words as merely a kind of subsidiary chapter added to the religion of the State by pedants and scholars.

Certain it is that the elaborate system of astro-theology which characterised Babylonian religion was an artificial creation. It was the result of a combination of religion with astronomy which was elaborated in the schools. Astronomy, like all other sciences, was under the control of the priests, the observatory rose by the side of the school within the precincts of the temple, and the dependence of the calendar on the observations of the astronomer gave them a religious character. Moreover, the astro-theology of Babylonia did not go back to primeval times. The identification of the official gods with the heavenly bodies belongs to an age when the official religion had already been crystallised into shape, and a map of the heavens had been made. We can almost watch its rise and trace its growth.

Nevertheless the rise and growth are of far earlier date than was formerly imagined. Astro-theology was not a mere learned scheme of allegorised science, the plaything of a school of pedants; it exercised a considerable influence upon the religion of Babylonia and upon the history of its development. It had, moreover, a background in the faith of the people. Like the rivers and streams, the stars also were really worshipped,(387) and the symbols drawn on the seal-cylinders show that this worship must go back to the oldest period of Babylonia. Even the ideograph that denotes “a god” represents an eight-rayed star. The fact is significant. At the time when the pictorial hieroglyphics were first being formed out of which the cuneiform characters were to grow, the star was already the symbol and representative of the divine. It was not as yet the more general and abstract “sky,” it was the particular star that was adored as a god. Babylonian religion, as far back as its written history leads us, really begins with Sabaism.

How is this fact to be reconciled with the further fact that the gods of Babylonia were once spirits and ghosts, the _zi_’s of Eridu and the _lil_’s of Nippur? To this question no answer at present is possible; at most we can only suggest that the _zi_, or spirit, was localised in the star. A spirit of the sun was as conceivable as a spirit of Ea, and the son of Ea, it must be remembered, became a sun-god. “The _zi_ of the god” meant originally in the primitive picture-writing “the spirit of the star,” and the literal rendering of the invocation in the early spells would be “the spirit of the star who is lord of Du-azagga,” “the spirit of the star who is mistress of the holy hill.” In the Book of Isaiah the Babylonian king is made to say that he would enthrone himself among the gods on the summit of the Chaldæan Olympos “above the stars of El”; and Nin-ip, the interpreter of En-lil, was at once the sun-god and the moon. Istar, it must not be forgotten, was primarily the evening star; and Istar was not only supreme among the goddesses of Babylonia, she was the type and representative of them all. The signs of the Zodiac had once been the monster allies of the dragon of chaos.

With all this, it may hereafter prove that the conception of the divine as a star was introduced by a different race from that which saw in it a spirit or a ghost. At all events, it was a conception which the inscriptions of Southern Arabia have shown to have prevailed among the Western Semites. Professor Hommel has made it clear(388) that the Semitic tribes to which the Arabs of the south, the Aramæans, and the Hebrews alike belonged, worshipped four supreme deities—Athtar, the evening and morning star; the moon-god and its messenger or “Prophet”; and the goddess of the sun. Athtar is the Babylonian Istar, who has become a male god in her passage to the Semites; and, while the people of Hadhramaut borrowed the name of Sin from Babylonia, those of Qatabân borrowed the name of Nebo (Anbây). Samas, the sun, has become a goddess; the moon-god has taken the foremost place in the pantheon, and the sun has accordingly been transformed into his colourless reflection. As in the case of Istar, so too in that of the sun-god, the genderless grammar of Sumerian facilitated the change. Â, the sun-god of Sippara, had become his wife under Semitic influence,(389) and from Sippara the conception of a solar goddess passed to the Semites on the western side of the Euphrates.

The supreme Baalim of the South Arabian inscriptions must thus have been of Babylonian origin. Name and character alike were derived from Sumerian Babylonia. And from this the further inference is obvious: Arabian and West Semitic “Sabaism,” with its worship of the heavenly bodies, was not indigenous. It must have been the result of contact with Babylonian civilisation, a contact which gave Ur and Harran a mixed population, and caused them to be the seats and centres of the worship of the moon-god. The primitive Semitic Baal—the “lord” of a specific plot of earth or tribal territory—became a moon-good or an evening star, while his wife was embodied in the sun.

This conclusion is confirmed by a study of the religion of Canaan. Here the place occupied by the moon-god among Arabians and Hebrews is taken by the sun. The supreme Baal is the sun-god, and the female Ashtoreth is identified with the moon. As I endeavoured to show in an earlier lecture, there was a period in the history of Babylonian religion when here also the sun-god was supreme. The gods were resolved into solar deities, or rather were identified with the sun. The solar element in Merodach threatened to absorb his human kingship; it was only his likeness to man that saved him from the fate of the Egyptian gods.

It is just this phase in the history of Babylonian theology that we find reflected in the theology of Canaan. Baal has passed into the sun-god, and his characteristics are those of the sun-gods of Babylonia. The historical monuments have told us how long and deep was the influence of Babylonia upon the culture of Canaan, and it was exercised just at the time when the solar faith had triumphed in the Babylonian plain. It is not without significance that Sargon of Akkad, who first brought the civilisation and arts of Babylonia to the shores of the Mediterranean, should have had his capital in a city which adjoined Sippara, the special seat of solar worship. While Arabia drew its inspiration from Ur, the religion of Canaan was modified by contact with a culture and theology that were more purely Babylonian. Phœnician tradition stoutly maintained that the ancestors of the Canaanitish people had come from the Persian Gulf.

“Sabaism,” therefore, to use the old term, must really have been an early form of Babylonian belief. It was communicated to the Semites west of the Euphrates at different times and in different ways. To the Western Semites of Arabia and Mesopotamia it came through Ur, and consequently set the moon-god at the head of the divine hierarchy. To the Canaanite it was carried more directly, but at a later period, when the solar worship had become dominant in Babylonia. The influence of Nippur had waned before that of Eridu, and out of Eridu had risen a culture-god whose son and vicegerent was the sun.

The moon-god was addressed in Southern Arabia by different titles, one of which was that ’Ammi or ’Ammu which forms part of the name of Khammurabi. Professor Hommel hints that even the Hebrew Yahveh may once have been a title of the moon-god among the Western Semites of Babylonia. As I was the first to point out, the name of Yahveh actually occurs in a document of the age of Abraham, where it enters into the composition of the name Yahum-ilu, the Joel of the Old Testament. Professor Hommel has since found other examples of it in tablets of the same period, thus overthrowing the modern theory which derives it from the Kenites.(390) It was already known to “Abram the Hebrew” in Ur of the Chaldees.

The hymn to the moon-god of Ur, to which I have referred in an earlier lecture,(391) is almost monotheistic in tone. To the writer he “alone is supreme in heaven and earth.” He is the creator of the universe; he is also the universal “Father,” “long-suffering and full of forgiveness, whose hand upholds the life of all mankind.” More than that, he is “the omnipotent one, whose heart is immensity, and there is none that may fathom it.” Among the other gods he has no rival; he causes the herb to grow, and the cattle and flock to bring forth; and he established law and justice among mankind. The angels of heaven and the spirits of the earth alike do homage to him; there is no goddess even who appears at his side. The hymn formed part of the ritual of the great temple at Ur before the birth of Abraham, and the Hebrew patriarch may well have listened to its teaching.

From Ur and its mixed population we can trace the worship of the Babylonian moon-god along the coasts of Southern Arabia as far as Egypt. In Hadhramaut, as I have already said, the very name of Sin was retained, and even in North-western Arabia the name of the sacred mountain of Sinai bears witness to the cult of the Babylonian deity. Early seal-cylinders associate with the moon-god both an ape and a dwarf-like figure, called Nu-gidda, “the dwarf,” in Sumerian, who dances in honour of the god, like the Danga dwarf in Egypt, or the cynocephalous apes of Thoth. In Egypt, however, the dwarf assumes the shape of Bes, who is often represented with an ape on either side; and Bes with his crown of feathers, along with the apes (or monkeys) that accompany him, came from the south of Arabia to the valley of the Nile.

The monotheistic tendency of the hymn to the moon-god stands in marked contrast to the polytheism of the solar hymns. The solar ritual, in fact, was essentially polytheistic. But Nannar or Sin, the moon-god, was “the prince of the gods,” the ruler of the starry hosts of heaven. By the side of him the stars were but as the sheep of a flock in the presence of their shepherd, or as the people of a State in the presence of their deified king. Hence he was lord over his brother gods in a way that the sun-god could never be; they became the hosts that he marshalled in fight against the enemies of light and order, the multitude that obeyed his voice as the sheep follow their shepherd. The moon-god was emphatically “the lord of hosts”!

The title was applied to other gods in later days. Nebuchadrezzar calls Nebo “the marshaller of the hosts of heaven and earth,”(392) and Tiglath-pileser I. makes Assur “the director of the hosts of the gods.” The kings transferred the title to themselves, changing only “gods” into “men,” and so becoming “kings of the hosts of mankind.” But the first signification of the term was “the host of heaven,” the stars of El above whom the king of Babylon sought to erect his throne. One of the primeval divinities of the pantheon—a divinity, indeed, who scarcely emerged from his primitive condition of a primordial spirit—was En-me-sarra,(393) “the enchanter of the (heavenly and earthly) hosts,” to whom in some of the old Babylonian cities a feast of mourning was celebrated at the time of the winter solstice in the month Tebet. A hymn entitles him “the lord of the earth, the prince of Arallu, lord of the place and the land whence none return, even the mountain of the spirits of earth ... without whom Inguriṡa cannot produce prosperity in field or canal, cannot create the crop ... he who gives sceptre and reign to Anu and El-lil.”(394) He is invoked, like the moon-god, to establish firmly the foundation-stone that it may last for ever. But it is not only over the spirits of the underground world that he holds sway; he reigns also in heaven, in the close vicinity of the ecliptic, and “the seven great gods” who were his sons were stars in the sky. His attributes, therefore, closely resemble those of the moon-god of Ur: like the moon-god, he is at once lord of the sky and of the underworld, a father of the stars of night who makes the green herb grow in the earth below. In En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” the realm of the moon-god was united with that of En-lil; as lord of the night he ruled in Hades, and was supreme even in that “mountain” of the ghost-world from which En-lil derived one of his names.(395)

But I must leave to others the task of further pursuing the path of exploration which I have thus sketched in outline. That Yahveh was once identified with the moon-god of Babylonia in those distant days, when as yet Abraham had not been born in Ur of Chaldees, explains his title of “Lord of hosts” better than the far-fetched theories which have been invented to account for it. The explanation has at least the merit of being supported by the ancient texts of Babylonia. Adventurous spirits may even be inclined to see in Sinai, the mountain of Sin, a fitting place for the promulgation of the Law of the Lord of hosts; but such speculations lie beyond the reach of the present lecturer, and the lectures he has undertaken to give.

The name of En-me-sarra, “the enchanter of the (spirit)-hosts,” brings us back to that dark background of magic and sorcery which distinguished and disfigured the religion of Babylonia up to the last. The Sumerian element continued to survive in the Babylonian people, and the magic which was its primitive religion survived also. It was never eliminated; behind the priest lurked the sorcerer; the spell and the incantation were but partially hidden beneath the prayer and the penitential psalm. One result of this was the exaggerated importance attached to rites and ceremonies, and the small space occupied by the moral element in the official Babylonian faith. There was doubtless a certain amount of spirituality, more especially of an individualistic sort; the sinner bewails his transgressions, and appeals for help to his deity, but of morality as an integral part of religion there is little evidence. We look in vain for anything analogous to the judgment-hall of Osiris and the negative confession of the Egyptian dead; the Babylonian gods, it is true, preferred that a man should walk uprightly, but his future salvation did not depend on his conduct in this life. He was punished in this world for his sins and shortcomings, but the sins were not confined to sins against morality; they equally included ceremonial transgressions.

At the same time, a sort of catechism which forms part of the ritual of the seers shows that a recognition of the moral element in religion was not altogether wanting. The following is Professor Zimmern’s translation of it: “Has he estranged the father from his son? Has he estranged the son from his father? Has he estranged the mother from her daughter? Has he estranged the daughter from her mother? Has he estranged the mother-in-law from her daughter-in-law? Has he estranged the brother from his brother? Has he estranged the friend from his friend? Has he estranged the companion from his companion? Has he refused to set a captive free, or has he refused to loose one who was bound? Has he excluded the prisoner from the light? Has he said of a captive, ‘Hold him fast,’ or of one who was bound, ‘Strengthen his bonds’? Has he committed sin against a god, or has he committed sin against a goddess? Has he offended a god, or has he held a goddess in light esteem? Is his sin against his own god, or is his sin against his own goddess? Has he done violence to one older than himself, or has he conceived hatred against an elder brother? Has he held his father and mother in contempt, or has he insulted his elder sister? Has he been generous in small things, but avaricious in great matters? Has he said ‘yea’ for ‘nay,’ and ‘nay’ for ‘yea’? Has he spoken of unclean things or [counselled] disobedience? Has he spoken wicked words?... Has he used false scales?... Has he accepted a wrong account, or has he refused a rightful sum? Has he disinherited a legitimate son, or has he recognised an illegitimate son? Has he set up a false landmark, or has he refused to set up a true landmark? Has he removed bound, border, or landmark? Has he broken into his neighbour’s house? Has he drawn near his neighbour’s wife? Has he shed his neighbour’s blood? Has he stolen his neighbour’s garment?”(396)

The list of questions reminds us of the negative confession of the Osirian creed, but the end and purpose of it is different. They are the questions put to the penitent in order that the priest may discover why the wrath of the gods has fallen upon him. They relate to this life only, not to the next; conformity to the moral code they imply brings with it no assurance of eternal happiness, it is a guarantee only against suffering and misfortune in the present world. The point of view of the Babylonian was that of the friends of Job.

Morality, in fact, was left in large measure to the legislator. An old code, which seems to have been ascribed to the god Ea, asserts explicitly the responsibility of the ruler, and his amenability to divine punishment for unrighteous dealing.

“If the king does not give heed to justice,” it begins, “his people will perish and his land be enfeebled.(397)

“If he gives no heed to the law of the land, Ea, the king of destinies, will change his destiny, and visit him with misfortune.

“If he gives no heed to his nobles, his days shall [not] be long.

“If he gives no heed to the wise, his land will revolt against him.

“If he gives heed to the (law-)book, the king will behold the strengthening of his land.

“If he gives heed to the writing (_sipir_) of Ea, the great gods will establish him in counsel and knowledge of justice.

“If he smites a man of Sippara and gives a wrong decision, the sun-god, who judges heaven and earth, will appoint another judge in his land, and a just prince and a just judge instead of unjust ones.

“If the sons of Nippur come to him for judgment, and he accepts bribes and treats them harshly, Bel, the lord of the world, will bring a foreign enemy against him and destroy his army; the prince and his general will be hunted like outcasts through the streets.

“If the sons of Babylon bring silver and offer bribes, and he favours the Babylonians and turns himself to their entreaty, Merodach, the lord of heaven and earth, will set his foes over him, and give his goods and his treasure to his enemy. The sons of Nippur, or Sippar, or Babylon who act thus shall be cast into prison.”(398)

The dissociation of ethics and religion in Babylonia was due to a considerable extent to the practical character of Babylonian theology and the limitation of the doctrine of rewards and punishments to this life. In contrast to the Egyptian, who may be said to have lived for the next world, the Babylonian lived for this. It was here that he was rewarded for his piety or punished for his sins. The world beyond the grave was a place of unspeakable dreariness. I have already described it in a previous lecture. It was a prison-house of darkness and unsubstantiality; a land where all things were forgotten, and those who inhabited it were themselves forgotten of men. It resembled the Hebrew Sheol; indeed, it is probable that the name of Sheol is borrowed from Babylonia,(399) and borrowed names are apt to indicate that the ideas connected with them were borrowed too. In the gloom of that underworld, where the ghosts of the dead fed on dust and refuse, the hideous monsters of chaos still moved and dimly showed themselves, while “the kings of the nations” sat on their shadowy thrones, welcoming the slaughtered king of Babylon with the words: “Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?” The dead man never again saw the light of the sun. There was no Osirian paradise to receive him, with its sunshine and happy meadows; even the brief period of light which the solar creed of Egypt allowed the bark of the sun-god to bring to the denizens of the other world, was denied to the dead Babylonian. Over the gates of the world beyond the grave the words were written: “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” There was no return; none, even with the help of Merodach, could come back to the home he had left on earth; the sevenfold gates of Hades opened only to admit those that entered it. Death meant the extinction of light and hope, even of the capacity for feeling either pleasure or pain.

It was on this life, therefore, that the religious thoughts of the Babylonian were centred. And his view of his relation to the gods was a curious mixture of spirituality and the commercial instinct. On the one hand, it was a question of barter; if the man was generous in his gifts to the gods, if he did what they approved and abstained from what they condemned, above all, if the rites and ceremonies of religion were correctly fulfilled, the gods were bound to grant him all that his heart desired. On the other hand, if misfortune fell upon him, it was a proof that he had sinned against them. And as the centuries passed the consciousness of sin sank more and more deeply into the heart of the Babylonian. At first, indeed, the sins were offences against the ritual rather than against the moral and spiritual code. The ghosts and spirits of the old Sumerian faith were non-moral; if some of them inflicted pain and disease upon man, it was because it was their nature to do so, and the only defence against them was in the charms of the sorcerer. But with the arrival of the Semite, and the consequent transformation of the goblin into a god and of the sorcerer into a priest, a new conception was introduced of the divine nature. The gods became human, and the humanity they put on was that of civilised man. They became moral agents, hating iniquity and loving righteousness, ready to help the creatures they had made, but chastising them for their offences as the father would his son. “Father,” in fact, is one of the commonest titles given to the god in the new age of Babylonian religion. It was only in the conception of Hades that the old ideas still maintained their influence, that the powers who ruled there still continued to be the malignant or non-moral monsters of an earlier belief, and that a common lot was believed to await in it all mankind, whatever might have been their conduct on this side of the grave.

In this world, on the contrary, the conviction that sin brought punishment with it became more and more pronounced. And with the conviction came an increasing belief in the efficacy of prayer and repentance, and the necessity for purity of heart. The words supposed to have been put into the mouth of Merodach after his creation of man, late in date though they may be, testify clearly to the fact. I give them in Mr. King’s translation(400)—

“Towards thy god shalt thou be pure of heart, for that is the
glory of the godhead;
Prayer and supplication and bowing low to the earth, early in the
morning shalt thou offer unto him....
The fear of god begets mercy, offerings increase life, and prayer
absolves from sin.
He that fears the gods shall not cry aloud [in grief],
he that fears the spirits of earth shall have a long [life].
Against friend and neighbour thou shalt not speak [evil].
Speak not of things that are hidden, [practise] mercy,
When thou makest a promise (to give), give and [hold] not [back].”

Already, in the age of Khammurabi, the author of the story of the Deluge makes it the punishment inflicted on mankind for their misdeeds, and the Chaldæan Noah is rescued from it by Ea on account of his piety. The penitential psalms and ritual texts are full of illustrations of the same fact. It is true that the misdeeds are often merely involuntary violations of the ceremonial law or offences against the ritual, but the sense of guilt attaching to them is already profound. It required centuries before the Babylonian was able to distinguish between moral and ceremonial sin,—if, indeed, he ever succeeded in doing so,—but at an early period a consciousness of the heinousness of sin already lay heavily upon him, as well as of the need of repentance. A profound sense of his transgressions, and of the punishment they deserved, had grown up within him long before he had learnt to confine it to moral guilt. In this respect, again, he differed from the Egyptian: penitence and the consciousness of sin belonged to Babylonia; we look in vain for them in the valley of the Nile. The light-hearted Egyptian was too contented to feel them; the gods he worshipped were, like himself, kindly and easy-going, and the pantheism of the upper classes offered no place to a reproachful conscience.

But the gods of Babylonia, in the days when the Sumerian and the Semite had become one people, were stern judges. The theology of Eridu was coloured and darkened by that of Nippur; Ea might save Xisuthros from the waters of the Flood, but En-lil had doomed all men to destruction. And whether it was the sun-god who was worshipped, or the moon-god of Ur, it was still a judge who beheld and visited all the deeds of living men. In the sun-god the judge predominated, in the moon-god the father, but that was all. The father was also a judge, the judge was also a father, and the same word might be used to denote both.

But it must be remembered that the judgeship of the son-god and the fatherhood of the moon-god were confined to the present world. They were not dead gods like Osiris, whose tribunal was in another world. There was no postponing the evil day, therefore; a man’s sins were visited upon him in this life, just as it was also in this life that his righteousness was rewarded. A death-bed repentance was useless; penitence, to be effective, must be manifested on this side of the grave.

Hence came the penitential ritual which forms so striking a feature in the service-books of Babylonia. It was reduced to a system, like the confessional in later days. The penitent was instructed by the priest what to say, and the priest pronounced his absolution. For the exercise of priestly absolution was another essential feature of Babylonian religion.

Besides the consciousness of sin and the conception of repentance, the idea of mediation must also be traced to Babylonia. On the earliest seals the priest is represented as acting as a mediator between the worshipper and his god. It is only through the priest that the layman can approach the deity and be led into the presence of the god. This idea of mediation has a twofold origin. On the one side, it goes back to the beliefs which saw in the magician—the predecessor of the priest—the possessor of knowledge and powers that were hidden from the rest of mankind; on the other side, it has grown out of the doctrine that the priest was the vicegerent of the god. It was thus the result of the union of two conceptions which I believe to have been respectively Sumerian and Semitic. The deified king or pontiff necessarily took the place of the god on earth; Gudea, for instance, at Lagas was the representative of the god Inguriṡa, and therefore himself divine. The fact that the gods were represented in human forms facilitated this conversion of the minister of the deity into his adopted son and representative; the powers and functions of the god were transferred to him, and, like the vassal-prince in the absence of the supreme king, he acted in the god’s place.